I was a guest speaker at the Write on the Red Cedar workshop last weekend, talking to other writers about fantasy and publishing and different aspects of the writing career … it was a fairly small group, so I ran it as more of an open Q&A. A lot of the questions were about what was hot in the market. What’s popular right now? What’s the next Big New Thing? What are agents and editors looking for? What do the kids want to read?

These are valid questions. Heck, the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency just posted an article about what sixteen American editors are looking for in 2014. It’s worth reading this sort of thing and learning what editors and agents are seeing too much of, and what they’re particularly interested in acquiring. But I think we place far too much weight on this sort of question, especially when we’re starting out.

What do publishers and agents and readers want? They want good, interesting stories.

That’s a total cop-out answer, I know. What does “good” or “interesting” mean? Was The Hunger Games the most interesting book to come out in its year? Was Twilight the best? Come on, Hines. Tell us the truth. Aren’t YA and Middle Grade hot right now, so shouldn’t we all be writing in those genres?

Okay, fine. You asked for it.

Remember, my opinion is obviously THE RIGHTEST, SMARTEST, COOLEST OPINION ON THE WHOLE INTERNET. However, I’m forced to acknowledge that plenty of authors with WRONG and UNCOOL opinions on how to build a career seem to have somehow succeeded as well, despite not doing everything exactly the way I think they should.

With that said, particularly for new writers, trying to write what’s hot probably isn’t the best way to go. For one thing, publishing is slow. For most people, it takes time to write a good book. If you publish traditionally, you’re looking at an additional few years of submitting your stuff, getting it edited and marketed, and so on, before it finally hits the bookstores. By which time you’ve totally missed the Sexy YA Were-Jaguar boat, which has now been replaced by Goblin/Leprechaun Romance. And sure, you could self-publish the book to try to speed things up a little, but you still need to write the thing. And if you’re trying to do it right, you still need to get it edited, get your cover art created, etc.

Another problem is that for most of us, the stories we write when we’re starting out are pretty derivative. We haven’t found our own voice and style. Which means if I see that Blue-Green Love: When Jig the Goblin got Lucky made the bestseller lists and decide to chase that trend, I’m a lot more likely to try to end up writing a weak imitation of that story instead of coming up with a truly new and original twist on hot goblin/leprechaun love.

My advice, for whatever it is or isn’t worth, is to write what you love. Write the kind of stories you want to read. Write things that excite you. Write what you’re passionate about. Chasing trends and writing stories you don’t care about just because you think they’re hot seems like a quick path to depression and burnout.

Goblin Quest[Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] was the fourth book I ever wrote, but it was one of the first times I said screw it, I don’t care about the market, I’m just going to write something fun, something that makes me happy. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Goblin Quest is in many ways the book that launched my career.

And as it turned out, monster-themed books were the Hot Trend in Germany when my goblin books came out. If I’d added David Hasselhoff to the story, I could have retired a millionaire. But even without the Hoff, I was able to ride that trend, not because of anything I had planned, but because I happened to have the right books at the right time, with an agent who could make that deal happen. It was awesome, and I’d love to catch another wave like that, but I don’t think that’s something I have a lot of control over.

My advice on writing for the market? Know what’s out there. Read what’s come before, and read what’s selling right now. Then go and write your own stories. Write something new. Tell stories that make you laugh and cry. Write the scenes that make you want to call up your best friend and say, “Holy shit, you won’t believe what I just did in this story!!!”

Those are the stories that will make you and your work stand out.

I’d love to hear other writers’ opinions on this one … even if those opinions are WRONG 😉

11 Comments

Heh, I’ve heard both of these two bits of advice before, but they do bear repeating. Even if they drive me kind of spare with how they can be taken as a bit self-contradictory. 😉 “Don’t worry about writing what’s hot but on the other hand, you should read stuff so you know what’s hot,” in other words.

But then I try to remind myself that the “read other people’s stuff” part of this advice, for me at any rate, more means “so that I’m not writing in a complete and utter vacuum and inadvertently writing something people lost interest in reading five years ago”. _And_, even more fundamentally, just because exposure to working examples of how to write a book is always good for a writer at any stage of her career, for the development of her own craft.

Heh. Yeah, I don’t think of it as reading what’s out there so you know what’s hot. It’s more like listening to the conversation before jumping in to contribute so you know what’s already been said. And yes, because you can learn a lot from what others have done and are doing.

[…] has put up a good post today going over a writing advice question I hear time and again: i.e., whether you should try to write to the market. I said over there, and I’ll say here too, that even though “don’t try to write […]

Plus you never know when you might see somebody else’s book and go “OMG OF COURSE why didn’t I think of it before? Were-zebras!” And then 90,000 words leap out of your fingers and *bam*, you have your next book.

The Hoff – Knight Rider, a man and his black, talking horse with red eyes that can even ride without a rider, are on their crusade against injustice. Always looking for freedom they tear down the Wall of Evil. 🙂

First off, Jim, a relative gave me a Paperwhite, though my daughter currently holds it hostage. If you write a goblin-leprechaun romance story, I will totally buy it. And Angela, that probably also goes for a were-zebra story. I mean, were-zebras, why has no one done this?

You watch the market for two reasons. The first is because fiction publishing is a symbiotic market. SFFH is an even more symbiotic market. Authors help each other sell and if a book sells well, what happens is that readers drawn to it — a lot of them browse outward. They don’t browse just to things that are exactly like whatever book or film/book caught their eye. They browse everywhere. It’s like each big book success reminds people that books exist and are fun. That’s why when Harry Potter became a tsunami, it didn’t just blow up YA fantasy fiction — it blew all of YA into an entirely new, giant market.

And it’s not just readers who are doing it. Authors get inspired by stuff that comes out, big successes and just books they think are cool. And they go a somewhat other direction from it. You can watch it like a wave in fiction publishing if you know where to look — there will be a group of contemporary YA fantasy, say, and then later, a group of comic fantasy to steampunk to post apocalypse fantasy and SF to zombie SF to spaceship SF, etc., as authors try stuff out. No types of stories or settings get thrown out — the market simply expands. (And this is why SF will never actually die, despite its hypochondrial belief that it will.)

Which means, since it is a symbiotic market that expands, that anything you are putting out in the market, you can promotionally wave at other authors’ fans. You aren’t stealing their fans — and you’ll be giving them some of yours. You’re just saying, hey, you really liked that contemporary were-zebra fantasy novel? I happen to have a steampunk mad golem story that you might like. (This is what SFF conventions do.) They don’t have to be the same at all, but if you know what’s there, you can promote to others how your book fits in the market (join the conversation knowledgeably.) You can explain to publishers what you are actually offering them and to readers if you are author publishing.

The other reason is that so you will stop doing things to sabotage your own writing. You are going to get told a lot of crap and if you internalize it, you will drive yourself bonkers. At SFFWorld, we get a lot of writers asking, am I doing this right? Is this allowed? as if there are some sort of story police coming to get them if they step out of line. They assume that established sub-categories are somehow rare and difficult to get people interested in because they don’t know that they are established. They don’t know what the lead titles are at the publishers they want to take them on. They get told things about the various markets that are flat out wrong and they don’t check them by actually looking at the books in multiple bookstores and vendors.

They may be convinced that, say, ghosts are cool, so as long as you have a ghost, you’re in, right? Except that for every ghost novel the publishers may take or readers might buy, thousands of other ghost manuscripts are rejected by publishers or don’t sell well to readers. Plot and fantasy elements (what’s hot,) don’t guarantee you anything in the market. So if you know what’s in the market, the scope of it, you’re less likely to try to police your own writing over a narrow definition of what you are writing. Policing your writing when creating tends to make your writing brain cross and not produce very well.

So you should know not simply what is “hot,” i.e. the biggest bestsellers and phenomena sellers, but you should also know what are the category bestsellers (the lower bestsellers and lead titles,) the mid-list titles and the new debuts. You should know a good bit of the history of the field — not the happy elf in the past and all dark and grim now myth, which is incorrect — but actual authors like C.J. Cherryh, Michael Moorcock, Robert Silverberg, Gene Wolfe — many of whom are still publishing today. The more you know, the better you understand how your book fits, and the better you can describe it to others. And the less time you’ll spend trying to write somebody else’s novel instead of your own.

SallyJan 14, 2014 @ 15:50:54

I’m thinkin’ were-zebras go well with bondage (ya know, bridles and saddles), and there you’ve got TWO hot trends in one book!

Well, maybe for the next International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day… 😀

But seriously, I love your description of the symbiosis involved here. Because you’re absolutely on the money. Even if I’m not reading every new book that comes out (even though I WANT TO, and I am defeated only by lack of time and shelf space), I do at least pay attention to release announcements just to have an idea of what is actually coming out. Partly for writer awareness, but also for reader awareness!

MartinJan 14, 2014 @ 16:47:27

Perhaps you need to combine markets? Books on cooking are always on the top the year’s list… So i am thinking on a Fantasy Cookbook Crossover novel :-D.

Bill StewartJan 17, 2014 @ 03:25:16

You can also hit an entirely different market, YA for sports fans, because football referees aren’t really humans in black and white striped uniforms, they’re what were-zebras do for a day job.

It’ll let you sell to the teenage boys who were otherwise going to borrow their friend’s sister’s copy of the book like they did with those sparkly vampire novels they wouldn’t admit to buying for themselves. The catch is that you’ve got to get the first book out while World Cup fever is still around (you’ve missed the US market window around the SuperBowl), or yeah, the goblin-market folks are definitely eating your lunch.